Police officers, public safety officers, firefighters, paramedics and the like carry various types of equipment in their vehicles. Several pieces of equipment are often carried in a single vehicle, and the driver often needs to operate the equipment while simultaneously driving the vehicle. Thus, various devices exist to secure multiple pieces of equipment within a vehicle so that they are accessible to the driver and/or other persons in the vehicle driver compartment.
These devices commonly include a hollow rectangular box situated on the floor of the vehicle between the driver seat and front passenger seat, including a horizontal top portion having an upwardly facing opening for receiving pieces of equipment. Police cruisers, for example, are commonly fitted with equipment boxes of this type. The boxes are used to house various types of equipment and controls used by police officers, such as radios, siren controls and light bar controls. Typically, the boxes are sized and positioned so that most of the box extends between the driver seat and the front seat. Only a small portion, if any, of the box will extend forward toward the dashboard beyond the driver seat and front passenger seat. In some police cruisers, the equipment box extends all the way back to the prisoner partition separating the rear seating area from the driver compartment. A laptop computer is often positioned between the box and dashboard, and is secured to the vehicle floor with various types of mounting hardware.
Systems employing the conventional equipment box described above suffer from a number of problems associated with the structure of the box. The box includes machined side and end panels, typically of steel or an aluminum alloy. Well known limitations of metal working require the metal end panels of the prior art to have square and sharp edges and corners that, even when broken, remain uncomfortable and even dangerous to the vehicle driver and passengers. Even when manufactured of bent sheet metal, consoles of the prior art have relied on square corners and edges without significant rounding or beveling.
The conventional equipment box configuration described above thus fails to provide safe corner and edge configurations, and the vehicle occupants are discomforted and even endangered.
Furthermore, consoles of the prior art are manufactured in fixed lengths so that changing the console's length requires replacement with an entire new console.